Monthly Archives: May 2017

I’m at a client site today. I’ve been working with this client since the new year, which is oddly long to be still working on a project. I run an incredibly tight schedule with a few delays built in because things rarely ever work out perfectly. People get sick, or emergencies come up, etc. Because of how booked up I am though, even with planning for problems, once that schedule has been exhausted, moving forward to complete a project is incredibly difficult. That’s where we are with this client. I gave them 5 weeks to get back on track on their end, then walked in this morning to find that essentially, nothing has happened since I was here last.

I’m not sure how this will play out moving forward. I can’t forward-fill my every free day with them indefinitely. Because of this, Friday won’t be an in-office day as I had planned. I’ll also likely be working through the weekend again as result.

I’m tired. I’ve had a stomache thing going on for days that isn’t improving. I need downtime in the worst way.

Sorry for the complaining. This is just frustrating. I only have work to write about because that’s all that my life is at the moment. Work. Grrr…

So, I’m several days back into being compliant with my medications. The doc also prescribed Adderall for my trouble focusing, though she did bring up the point that I may just have too many things going on at work and home with all the travel, planning for travel, managing 23 active clients who need training or support from me, programming a $750k project from scratch, implementing three web to print solutions, managing three customers who are having color issues with their jobs (each is either environmental or operator – machines are fine), learning the new software solutions introduced last week at corporate, working on two certifications and learning javascript, HTML5 and CSS3 on the fly because one software vendor we support completely shifted their design tool to use web based standards for designing instead of their really nice designer tool.

Add to all that, trying to get my wife pregnant with a scrot’ that hurts still (this has improved a lot since my last post), planning and paying for the in-laws to visit for a couple of weeks, and keeping things up around the house/yard, dealing with specialist appointments for fertility checking, liver disease kidney disease, and a mild autoimmune difficiency.

So.. It’s possible she’s right. To be fair, though, she agrees not much can change in the short-term. So.. Amphetamines! Not ideal, but it does work.

I was up until midnight the night before last and finished more on that massive programming deal in 9 hours than I had in the last week. I was even able to solve two coding problems because the information I’m converting has some sloppy code in it from where the original developer apparently decided to deviate from standard practices Part of the project is converting a huge library of Delphax forms to PDF’s to use as background. If you’ve ever tried to hand-code PostScript or PDF, you can appreciate the challenge I’m facing. Which reminds me.. I’ve another client with something I coded a huge solution for before that they’ve changed something and have no idea how to update my code.. I need to give them a call and walk them through it.

So, yeah, work. I’m booked out for the next 7 weeks solid. If I get sick in there, I’m completely screwed and whatever customer has been waiting an unreasonable amount of time for me would also be screwed. I’ve been sick twice over the last couple of months and went to one of those urgent care clinics that have popped up everywhere, gotten whatever was needed to treat my problem, loaded up on cold meds and trained customers completely hands-off on mt part (pint, click here, etc).

I’ve also decided to start eating better, and less overall. I need to lose weight. As my sister-in-law would put it, I’ve blown up like a tick over the last three years living off from restaurant food without regard to the ingredients and having an aversion to veggies. The advantage and disadvantage to being an adult.. You can eat whatever the hell you want, and I apparently eat my feelings.